Further Reading

The three new major encryption tools were adopted within a three- to five-month period following leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, according to the report. The apps replace or bolster the original Mujahideen Secrets crypto program that al Qaeda members have mainly used for e-mail since 2007. One of the new releases, known as Tashfeer al-Jawwal, is a mobile program developed by the Global Islamic Media Front and released in September. A second, Asrar al-Ghurabaa, was released by the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham in November, around the same time the group broke away from the main al Qaeda group following a power struggle. The third program is known as Amn al-Mujahid and was released in December by that Al-Fajr Technical Committee.

The influx of new programs for al Qaeda members came amid revelations that the NSA was able to decode vast amounts of encrypted data traveling over the Internet. Among other things, according to documents Snowden provided, government-sponsored spies exploited backdoors or crippling weaknesses that had been surreptitiously and intentionally built in to widely used standards.

"I think the reverse is true. I think this will help US intelligence efforts," he wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. "Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight. Last fall, Matt Blaze said to me that he thought that the Snowden documents will usher in a new dark age of cryptography, as people abandon good algorithms and software for snake oil of their own devising. My guess is that this an example of that."

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"Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight

Agreed. We had an app (web front, SQL back) abandoned by the vendor. We didn't know their sekrit sysadmin password to it. So I looked at the 'Users' DB table - specifically the hashed passwords. Then I changed some non-privileged user passwords and watched how the hashes changed in response. Hah. It was home brew hashing and it was comically insecure. I got the password in about 5 hours once I understood their algorithm.

Very smart people worked on industry standards crypto, and that's often proven insecure some years down the road. Homebrew crypto is highly likely to have comically simple methods of bypassing it.

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"Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight

Agreed. We had an app (web front, SQL back) abandoned by the vendor. We didn't know their sekrit sysadmin password to it. So I looked at the 'Users' DB table - specifically the hashed passwords. Then I changed some non-privileged user passwords and watched how the hashes changed in response. Hah. It was home brew hashing and it was comically insecure. I got the password in about 5 hours once I understood their algorithm.

Very smart people worked on industry standards crypto, and that's often proven insecure some years down the road. Homebrew crypto is highly likely to have comically simple methods of bypassing it.

>>Taliban Virus >> >>DEAR INFIDEL RECEIVER: >> >>You have just received a Taliban virus. Since we are not technologically >>advanced in Afghanistan, this is a MANUAL virus. Please delete all of the >>files on your hard drive yourself and send this e¬mail to everyone you >>know. >> >> >>Thank you very much for helping me in my efforts to destroy western >>civilization. >> >>Allah be praised, >> >>Mullah Mujaffa, >> >>Taliban IT Manager

See, that's my problem. If Snowden had stuck to tales of domestic abuses, more power to him. But what he did was vacuum up everything he could about intelligence gathering, foreign and domestic, and give it to journalists.

Some of it has no effect, some of it hurts intelligence gathering, some of it might help. But decisions about foreign intelligence gathering shouldn't be made by a fairly young, disaffected contractor. He says he didn't want to hurt the USA, if fact he's repeated that many times, but I have some difficulty believing that he has not hurt the USA and USA companies overseas. I'm not saying that it was intentional, but that is the effect.

Last fall, Matt Blaze said to me that he thought that the Snowden documents will usher in a new dark age of cryptography, as people abandon good algorithms and software for snake oil of their own devising.

Eh, I somewhat agree with this sentiment, but it depends on the person. Anyone that's been around the block once or twice in the IT world knows the folly of rolling-your-own encryption instead of going with well established and secure protocols. I think there will be groups that abandon established standards for homebrew or DIY encryption schemes, but I think these types are only going to be those that know enough about computers to be dangerous (amateurs, hacks, etc).

In reality what I think we'll see (and I think we're already seeing this) is that people are going to pay more attention to open source security software and be much more rigorous with checking for potential bugs (Heartbleed, anyone?). I think we'll also begin to see lots of people actually looking at the defaults when they set up a personal web or IM server, as well as an increase in tunneling and other methods of securing traffic and data.

I don't think we'll ever really be able to quantify in a reliable way the impact that Snowden's leaks have had on the world, nor that we'll ever be able to directly attribute any improvements in security directly to him, but he certainly got the conversation started and got us thinking.

Last fall, Matt Blaze said to me that he thought that the Snowden documents will usher in a new dark age of cryptography, as people abandon good algorithms and software for snake oil of their own devising.

Eh, I somewhat agree with this sentiment, but it depends on the person. Anyone that's been around the block once or twice in the IT world knows the folly of rolling-your-own encryption instead of going with well established and secure protocols.

Yeah, but these people are no where near the IT world. Yeah, they may be engineers, chemists, physicists and what-not but I think that will lead them (or their leaders within the movement) to believe that they ARE smart enough to come up with their own, secure, encryption algorithm.

See, that's my problem. If Snowden had stuck to tales of domestic abuses, more power to him. But what he did was vacuum up everything he could about intelligence gathering, foreign and domestic, and give it to journalists.

Some of it has no effect, some of it hurts intelligence gathering, some of it might help. But decisions about foreign intelligence gathering shouldn't be made by a fairly young, disaffected contractor. He says he didn't want to hurt the USA, if fact he's repeated that many times, but I have some difficulty believing that he has not hurt the USA and USA companies overseas. I'm not saying that it was intentional, but that is the effect.

The phrase "Don't shoot the messenger" is seldom more appropriate.

edit: If revealing SOME of your intelligence activities causes your allies to question their allegiance to you it might just be you who's at fault...

See, that's my problem. If Snowden had stuck to tales of domestic abuses, more power to him. But what he did was vacuum up everything he could about intelligence gathering, foreign and domestic, and give it to journalists.

Some of it has no effect, some of it hurts intelligence gathering, some of it might help. But decisions about foreign intelligence gathering shouldn't be made by a fairly young, disaffected contractor. He says he didn't want to hurt the USA, if fact he's repeated that many times, but I have some difficulty believing that he has not hurt the USA and USA companies overseas. I'm not saying that it was intentional, but that is the effect.

Or better yet, if our gov stuck to just collecting bad guy communications instead of Everybody on Planet Earth, then nobody would have disclosed anything.

Hmm, Snowden disclosed all because the NSA collected all, and you complain that he disclosed all.

So in a grand display of cosmic irony, Snowden's leaking of the depth and breadth of NSA datamining has not driven the groups it is ostensibly targeted at further undergound into more secure communication and anonymised means - as was widely the fear from the intelligence community - but instead made their communication both easier to identify (specific application traffic) AND easier to decrypt (homebrew encryption pitfall)!

"Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight

Agreed. We had an app (web front, SQL back) abandoned by the vendor. We didn't know their sekrit sysadmin password to it. So I looked at the 'Users' DB table - specifically the hashed passwords. Then I changed some non-privileged user passwords and watched how the hashes changed in response. Hah. It was home brew hashing and it was comically insecure. I got the password in about 5 hours once I understood their algorithm.

Very smart people worked on industry standards crypto, and that's often proven insecure some years down the road. Homebrew crypto is highly likely to have comically simple methods of bypassing it.

State sponsored terrorist groups aren't in the same league as a vendor who abandons a product. You seem to be assuming that such groups don't have access to very smart people, which might or might not be true. It's never wise to underestimate the enemy. History is full of failures because of that very human tendency.

There is currently no such organisation as al Qaeda. It used to exist, but hasn't for years.

There are various groups, some of whom align strongly with what were al Qaeda's goals. Some that partially align. Some that don't align at all. There are various alignments (both explict and philosophically) between these groups. In the 1980s, the US used to supply some of them with weapons (e.g. Mujaheddin in Afghanistan).

Continued use of the term 'al Qaeda' simply supports the US security apparatus' propaganda and fear-mongering, and is lazy speech. At least this article was explicit and actually referenced particular existing organisations. The sooner we put the 'al Qaeda' bogeyman to bed, the better.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell

See, that's my problem. If Snowden had stuck to tales of domestic abuses, more power to him. But what he did was vacuum up everything he could about intelligence gathering, foreign and domestic, and give it to journalists.

Some of it has no effect, some of it hurts intelligence gathering, some of it might help. But decisions about foreign intelligence gathering shouldn't be made by a fairly young, disaffected contractor. He says he didn't want to hurt the USA, if fact he's repeated that many times, but I have some difficulty believing that he has not hurt the USA and USA companies overseas. I'm not saying that it was intentional, but that is the effect.

Of course, because only the liberty of the people in a single country matters. How silly of him to expose violations of the rights of the rest of the world too!

"Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight

Agreed. We had an app (web front, SQL back) abandoned by the vendor. We didn't know their sekrit sysadmin password to it. So I looked at the 'Users' DB table - specifically the hashed passwords. Then I changed some non-privileged user passwords and watched how the hashes changed in response. Hah. It was home brew hashing and it was comically insecure. I got the password in about 5 hours once I understood their algorithm.

Very smart people worked on industry standards crypto, and that's often proven insecure some years down the road. Homebrew crypto is highly likely to have comically simple methods of bypassing it.

State sponsored terrorist groups aren't in the same league as a vendor who abandons a product. You seem to be assuming that such groups don't have access to very smart people, which might or might not be true. It's never wise to underestimate the enemy. History is full of failures because of that very human tendency.

Nowhere near as full as the history of cryptographic systems built by very smart people which turned out to be not as secure as they seemed at first. It's not impossible that there's a one-in-a-trillion genius out there who can build world-class crypto on his own, without the sort of Darwinian selection that comes from having an entire academic community of very smart people do their upmost to poke holes in it, but the odds are, as Schneier put it, slight.

Counterpoint: Hunting down bugs in a bunch of homebrew encryption routines, even when the bugs are plentiful, can be more resource-intensive than hunting less frequent bugs in more widely used software.

Hunting down errors in well-vetted, industry-standard encryption routines takes a lot of time and effort, but once you find it you can use it all over the place. Finding the bugs in AliceCode, BobCrypt, Edgarware Encrypt, all might be easy, but their scope of use is each much smaller. Economies of scale are lacking, so gathering intel from a huge pile of sloppy encryption routines may be more difficult than a small number of well-written ones

Yeah.... unless they've just forked GnuPG as "QaePG", they probably have a horrible system that will fall to modern differential cryptanalysis within a day.

Somehow, I bet there aren't many experts on elliptic curves and modular forms among the ranks of Al Qaeda.

The only people with beards at most math conferences are 70-year-old shoeless hippies from Berkeley, etc.

[edit: typing is hard..]

The most educated and skilled Mathematicians while Europe was bringing up the technological rear were from the middle East. The system of math notation in world wide use is Arabic. I'm not sure why you are picking on 70 year old shoeless hippies. Berkeley isn't a bad school.

Yes, several hundred years ago... not very pertinent to the subject at hand.

I'm not picking on them at all, just noting that Al Qaeda operatives aren't known for being at the forefront of pure mathematics and computer science.

The most educated and skilled Mathematicians while Europe was bringing up the technological rear were from the middle East.

That was then, this is now.

It's sad, really, that a large segment of the population there adopted or were rolled over by extremist superstitions when the Middle East could have turned out to be a pinnacle of civilization. Similar to how certain factions in the west are doing the same nowadays.

See, that's my problem. If Snowden had stuck to tales of domestic abuses, more power to him. But what he did was vacuum up everything he could about intelligence gathering, foreign and domestic, and give it to journalists.

Some of it has no effect, some of it hurts intelligence gathering, some of it might help. But decisions about foreign intelligence gathering shouldn't be made by a fairly young, disaffected contractor. He says he didn't want to hurt the USA, if fact he's repeated that many times, but I have some difficulty believing that he has not hurt the USA and USA companies overseas. I'm not saying that it was intentional, but that is the effect.

The September 11, 2001 attacks were used to justify this travesty.

Some of the people behind it (such as Dick Cheney) are true believers from the dirty-tricks, "if the president does it, then it's not illegal," Nixon administration. They've wanted this power ever since it was stripped from them in the 1970s. Now they have it back.

Yeah.... unless they've just forked GnuPG as "QaePG", they probably have a horrible system that will fall to modern differential cryptanalysis within a day.

Somehow, I bet there aren't many experts on elliptic curves and modular forms among the ranks of Al Qaeda.

The only people with beards at most math conferences are 70-year-old shoeless hippies from Berkeley, etc.

[edit: typing is hard..]

The most educated and skilled Mathematicians while Europe was bringing up the technological rear were from the middle East. The system of math notation in world wide use is Arabic. I'm not sure why you are picking on 70 year old shoeless hippies. Berkeley isn't a bad school.

Yes, but the issue of who is advancing is often not a matter of who is the smartest, but rather, who is the most open. Highly advanced civilizations often stagnate when they start being isolationist, and much of the territory there is suffering from that problem right now.

If you know of a disproportionate amount of crypto experts in the Middle East, please bring that to the table, but it would seem that they don't have a culture conducive to exceptional expertise, and they are not getting the kind of scrutiny other standards get, so the likelihood of them developing better crypto is minimal. If they do have an option, then we should try and get them over here and give them lots and lots of money.

The beard comment is a bit uncalled for, especially since there are a number of beards present at security conferences.

Thanks you Snowman for helping sponsor a future terrorist event in our neighborhood. Guess that won't affect you huh.

I am so sick of this ill-informed bullshit.

You want terrorist activity? Go attack other countries and stomp around the world while using terms like 'crusade', and spy on your goddam allies to show everyone what real arrogance looks like. I used to really like my country, but now it's getting overrun by assholes who would just as soon trade 250 years of mostly honorable behavior for their own personal power and wealth.

Remember that 9/11 all occurred before Snowden was even working for the NSA. And look at how well they prevented that from happening.

Yeah.... unless they've just forked GnuPG as "QaePG", they probably have a horrible system that will fall to modern differential cryptanalysis within a day.

Somehow, I bet there aren't many experts on elliptic curves and modular forms among the ranks of Al Qaeda.

The only people with beards at most math conferences are 70-year-old shoeless hippies from Berkeley, etc.

[edit: typing is hard..]

Yes and no. You're likely right they don't have those kinds of experts. But it's worth noting that al Qaeda and other Islamist groups have drawn their support largely from middle class technical professions like engineering. There may be more proficiency you'd expect. There also might be just as much bumbling as you'd expect.

Evidence: The public profile of Al Qaeda shows mostly men with distinctive beards. Experts in crypto arise in a specific academic community. While beards do appear in the academic community, they occur in people who tend to have liberal cultural/political views opposite those of Al Qaeda. Thus, the intersection of Al Qaeda and high-level crypto experts is probably very low.

State sponsored terrorist groups aren't in the same league as a vendor who abandons a product. You seem to be assuming that such groups don't have access to very smart people, which might or might not be true. It's never wise to underestimate the enemy. History is full of failures because of that very human tendency.

There's more to it than just having smart people, at least as long as we are operating within human parameters. You need to audit the standards for vulnerabilities, which requires having a lot of eyes on the underlying code. It's a process that takes a lot of time and manpower. Also, it's not even a hypothetical. We see that they have homebrew crypto, and we probably have a pretty good idea of how strong it actually is.

But don't let reality get in the way of a dogmatic opposition to any and all actions of Edward Snowden.

Counterpoint: Hunting down bugs in a bunch of homebrew encryption routines, even when the bugs are plentiful, can be more resource-intensive than hunting less frequent bugs in more widely used software.

Hunting down errors in well-vetted, industry-standard encryption routines takes a lot of time and effort, but once you find it you can use it all over the place. Finding the bugs in AliceCode, BobCrypt, Edgarware Encrypt, all might be easy, but their scope of use is each much smaller. Economies of scale are lacking, so gathering intel from a huge pile of sloppy encryption routines may be more difficult than a small number of well-written ones

Edit: Hit Post too soon.

Having looked into cryptography but not an expert, I have learned there some very common encryption mistakes made by amateurs and semi-pros that make cracking the encryption scheme fairly easy. The math behind cryptography is very messy and unless you have studied it thoroughly your cookbook scheme is likely very vulnerable. And there are not that many people who truly understand the math behind cryptography worldwide.

Combine this with good traffic analysis and often you can get a good clue about the encryption. A surprising common failing is not understanding the opening/closing a message with the same phrases will endanger your encryption. Traffic analysis will help identify where each phrase is.

The irony is Snowden may have made cracking government traffic harder but made some panic and "roll their own" cryptography "solution" that is very easy to crack.

"Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight

Agreed. We had an app (web front, SQL back) abandoned by the vendor. We didn't know their sekrit sysadmin password to it. So I looked at the 'Users' DB table - specifically the hashed passwords. Then I changed some non-privileged user passwords and watched how the hashes changed in response. Hah. It was home brew hashing and it was comically insecure. I got the password in about 5 hours once I understood their algorithm.

Very smart people worked on industry standards crypto, and that's often proven insecure some years down the road. Homebrew crypto is highly likely to have comically simple methods of bypassing it.

State sponsored terrorist groups aren't in the same league as a vendor who abandons a product. You seem to be assuming that such groups don't have access to very smart people, which might or might not be true. It's never wise to underestimate the enemy. History is full of failures because of that very human tendency.

It's also not wise to assume the enemy is more competent than everyone else.

Evidence: The public profile of Al Qaeda shows mostly men with distinctive beards. Experts in crypto arise in a specific academic community. While beards do appear in the academic community, they occur in people who tend to have liberal cultural/political views opposite those of Al Qaeda. Thus, the intersection of Al Qaeda and high-level crypto experts is probably very low.

By "public profile of Al Qaeda" do you mean the people who hold the political power in the organization?

The intersection between politicians (of all countries and organizations) and high-level crypto experts is probably very low.

Politicians, by their nature, interact with people because they want to control people. Crypto experts, by their nature, are high functioning computer literates who (speaking generally) have more interest in controlling computers than people.